You’ve seen enough research on video to make your eyes glaze over and you’re finally convinced: your company needs to invest in a video creation platform.
This decision may seem like a no-brainer to you, but it isn’t a done deal until you win over the people who hold the purse strings. To get your boss to approve a video platform, you must make a strong case for how video will help your company meet its goals.
We’ll help you secure approval from leadership in this article with guidance on:
- Assessing your company’s objectives in order to craft the most persuasive case for adopting a video platform
- Outlining the main benefits of video to share with your boss
- Constructing a compelling pitch that will win your boss over to the power and potential of video creation
With these tactics, you’ll be able to prove that video creation is a winning idea and convince your boss to approve a video tool.
Step 1: Figure out what your boss cares about
It doesn’t matter if you work in marketing, IT, L&D, or HR: your boss isn’t going to approve the money for a video tool unless you clearly show how the investment aligns with your organization’s goals and objectives.
To understand how video production could fit with management’s priorities, you’ll need to answer these questions:
- What are the top priorities for the company this year?
- What are your department’s key objectives?
- How is your department budget currently allocated?
- What do your department’s priorities seem to be, based on the budget?
Answer these questions by digging into internal resources:
- Company memos are useful for clarifying company-wide goals, and yearly priorities and positioning your video needs into the wider context of the company’s initiatives.
- Quarterly or monthly reports provide a specific look at what the company is prioritizing in any given time period. For example, you may discover that there is a surplus of support tickets during the holiday period and that a resource library would help reps save time resolving issues. Tidbits like these can be seeds for potential video use cases.
- Department budgets highlight the resources your department has available for new initiatives, so you’re able to gauge if there is room for a video tool.
- Team meeting notes provide better insights on your team’s evolving priorities that are more detailed than less frequent updates, like quarterly reports and annual memos.
- Talk to your co-workers. Reach out to team members who have successfully pitched tool adoptions in the past to see how they approached the subject. You could also talk to your boss, if they’re available, to get a better sense of their priorities and concerns.
Once you’ve gathered enough information, you should have a decent idea of your company’s current objectives. Now it’s time to figure out how video can help advance those goals.
Step 2: Understand how video aligns with your boss’ goals
Once you have a good sense for your boss’ main priorities, you can identify which benefits of video are aligned to your company’s objectives and worth highlighting. Below, we’ve broken down some benefits of video by function.
Marketing Benefits
Compared to other media, video is one of the strongest tools for grabbing the attention of prospects and bringing them closer to making a purchase. With a video platform at your disposal, you’ll be able to consistently nurture potential customers with constant video creation.
Video’s primary marketing benefit is an increase in engagement and retention. Vyond users at AmeriCash found that including video in their email campaigns improved their click-through-rate (CTR) by 120%.
In addition to driving conversions, video is an effective tool for building brand and product awareness. In a survey from Hubspot, 43% of respondents found video to be the most memorable type of branded content.
Finally, video is highly shareable. Wyzowl recently reported that audiences are twice as likely to share content that includes video. By investing in video creation, brands are able to get their content in front of more potential customers.
Training Benefits
Along with marketing, employee training is a highly effective way to make the most of video. Training videos allow you to quickly impart knowledge to team members with less overhead than other mediums.
Video training offers the benefits of structure and uniformity. There is no danger of an instructor leaving out details: all employees receive exactly the same information when they watch. In one study, 80% of respondents said that video would make the onboarding and training process smoother and more effective.
Videos can also help speed up the training process. Catalina Marketing saw a 67% reduction in onboarding time for one group of new employees by introducing animated video into their training programs.
Using video can also help companies cut training expenses, such as hiring an in-person instructor or securing a training location. Replacing live action courses with animated video, when done well, can save organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars without compromising quality.
Support Benefits
Support reps can also use video tools to communicate with customers and resolve their issues in an engaging, efficient way.
Creating simple how-to videos, for example, can save support teams time since many customers have the same questions. Instead of repeatedly walking through the same problem for each customer, support teams can create an evolving library of video content to address common questions.
Support staff can also personalize the customer experience by creating custom educational videos for clients. At Vyond, our Customer Support agents often create tutorials and custom videos like this one to meet the individual needs of each customer.
Across each of these three departments, there are clear data-backed benefits of video. Pick out stats that are tied to your boss’ interests and goals and will help you make a case for investing in a video platform.
Step 3: Identify top video creation platforms for your company
At this point, you know how to justify video creation platforms on a general level. Strengthen your case with an in-depth comparison of a few video tools. With this research, you’ll be ready for questions about pricing and features, and have several recommendations up your sleeve to pitch to them.
Evaluate Cost
Understand costs in advance so you can articulate how a video tool will fit into your department’s overall budget.
Prices can vary pretty widely across video platforms, and the right choice for your organization depends on the type, quality, and number of videos you want to produce.
Research a variety of tools, and collect pricing from multiple platforms to get an idea of how rates vary based on features and plan sizes. Many video services have an online pricing page detailing their various plans, but others may need to be contacted directly for a quote.
If your budget is limited, animation platforms like Vyond are worth considering. Animation is cost-effective since you’re able to avoid the major expenses of live video, such as hiring a large production team and location scouting. For example, Cottingham & Butler saved an estimated $600,000 to $1.4 million in potential production costs by using Vyond’s animation platform instead of live-video vendors they were considering.
Evaluate Features
Along with cost, it’s important to look for tools with features that are suited to the organizational goals you identified in step one.
For example; if your department wants to create a large number of tutorial videos, cost-efficiency is going to be a priority. If an individual video is affordable to make, scaling production should be, too.
Some critical features that businesses commonly look for in video platforms include:
- Security: Protecting your brand’s assets is essential. Look for a platform that prioritizes security and encrypts your data to minimize the risk of leaked or stolen intellectual property.
- Ease-of-Use: If you’re a novice, or someone who wants a bit more guidance, look for platforms that provide helpful templates to jumpstart your creation.
- Distribution: Prioritize platforms that enable you to export your work in multiple formats, from .mp4 to .gif, in order to maximize your ability to share your content.
- Quality: You’re spending money on this platform, so your videos ought to look professional. Achieving a polished look is particularly important if you’re creating public or client-facing videos. Look for platforms that feature well-designed assets and optional advanced design features.
After doing this homework on available video tools, select the five platforms best-suited for your organization to recommend to your boss.
Step 4: Prepare your presentation
You’ve completed all of the necessary research in steps one through three. Now it’s time to craft this information into a persuasive pitch for your boss.
Lead your presentation with the research you’ve done on your company’s priorities and how video can address the problems they are trying to solve. Remember that video is not a panacea. While there are probably many applications of video within the company, stay focused on what video can do for your department specifically to keep your boss engaged.
Be prepared to recommend three to five platforms that are best suited to the company’s needs. Don’t justify your selections with affordability, even if that was a factor you considered. Instead, focus on features that will be especially useful to the company. Hearing this purpose-driven reasoning, your boss will be more likely to make room in the budget for the tool.
While emphasizing affordability isn’t especially persuasive, explaining the ROI of video tools can be extremely convincing. Explain how video tools can potentially help your company reduce costs and increase revenue in the long run, using the data in step two along with your own research.
As you craft your presentations, try to emulate past proposals from co-workers that were successful at your company. You may even ask team members who delivered these pitches if you could review your video platform presentation with them to get feedback.
Looking for more presentation skills? Check out our 30 tips on planning, writing, and delivering presentations in this resource.
Make the strongest possible case for video
It doesn’t matter how much you think your department needs a video tool. To win over the decision-makers, you must speak to their needs when requesting approval for a video platform.
Make the most of your boss’ time by creating a succinct, yet powerful presentation on why the company should invest in a video tool. To do this, start with the most persuasive information—how a video tool will benefit the company at a high level. Once you’ve grabbed their attention with this narrative, you can dive into the details that will support your argument and persuade leadership to adopt a video tool.
To make a strong case for video, you could try making a video! Learn about Vyond’s video animation platform and start a free 14-day free trial.
